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Jul10

Open Data Store at Microsoft WW Partner Conference in Orlando, USA

Posted by in Nekategorizirano

If a few days, we will be part of 15.000+ people that will attend Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando. We are not only participating as a attendees, actually we have a quite active role there.

First, we are organizing a Partner workshop to present the idea and Framework to a few dozen of Microsoft partners that will evaluate the Open Data Store Framework, and then we will present the whole… case in front of 500+ CEE partners that potentially can drive with us the project.

We are looking forward to meet some of you there, and discuss some opportunities. Please ping us directly to set up a meeting or just to grab a beer… or whatever.

Jun09

ODataStore Platform is a Finalist of the Microsoft 2015 Partner of the Year Award

Posted by in opendata, opengovernment

finalist_logoMicrosoft Corp. on Tuesday announced the winners and finalists of the Microsoft 2015 Partner of the Year Awards. The annual awards celebrate top Microsoft partners that are demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

Award winners and finalists, chosen out of nominations from around the world, will be recognized at the 2015 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference taking place July 12–16, 2015, in Orlando, Fla.

This year, Microsoft recognized partners in 43 categories that celebrate each of the core partner competencies, including cloud technology, public sector, citizenship, sales excellence and many more. More than 2,300 entries were collected from 108 different countries worldwide; the award finalists and winners were selected from a group of nominations based on their commitment to customers, their solution’s market impact and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies.

“The 2015 Partner of the Year Award winners and finalists honor our top partners that demonstrate excellence in providing solutions and value to our mutual customers,” said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft. “This year’s award winners and finalists are among the most innovative our partner ecosystem has to offer. Congratulations to each winner on this incredible achievement.”

ODataStore project, Open Source project on Azure cloud technology, driven by Omega Software, was one of the finalist in the category “Open Source on Azure”. This is recognition that showcases that ODS is future platform for the Open Data delivery, and that data model and application model that its introduces deliver significant value to the smart cities and government efforts to drive openess, transparency and collaboration.

Open Data Store representatives will be in Orlando, USA at the final ceremony where the awards will be introduced.

For more info, please visit: http://news.microsoft.com/2015/06/02/microsoft-announces-2015-partner-of-the-year-winners-and-finalists/

 

 

Apr18

Open Data in Europe: some examples and some initiatives

Posted by in opendata

We have a number of great examples of Open Data in Europe. We will try to update this list to have all interesting and new cases, but in the case that you know something that we do not know, please ping us back with the info.

CROATIA

1. DATA.GOV.HR – Republic of Croatia national Open Data portal that have all standard CKAN elements, but also some additional extensions.

 

Mar30

Big and Open Data in Europe: A growth engine or a missed opportunity?

Posted by in opendata

The EU28 economy stands to gain by a significant 1.9% increase in area GDP by 2020 if the appropriate policy measures that foster the proliferation of Big and Open Data are implemented, according to a research paper entitled “Big & Open Data in Europe: A growth engine or a missed opportunity?” co-authored by demosEUROPA and the Warsaw Institute of Economic Studies. The paper investigates the macroeconomic impact of Big and Open data on the European economy, providing policy makers with recommendations of how to maximise the economic opportunity ahead of us.

bigandopendatamacroeconomiceffects

From an economic perspective, it’s undeniable. There is huge economic potential in the European Region for Big Data uptake. Although there are big differences in the way Big Data is being approached, each corner of the EU could benefit from it. By splitting Europe into three categories—northern, southern, and eastern—and assessing the effects of big data in 21 sectors across the EU’s 28 member states, this study considers the economic impact and required paradigm shift when regarding big data and provides policy recommendations at an EU level. Key findings of our report include:

  1. Big and open data will bring immediate benefits to advanced markets in Europe, while it has strong long-term potential in less mature markets – speeding up the growth of the service sector and driving the creation of knowledge economies. Indeed, the implementation of open data policies would have significant growth implications for Europe, leading to an estimated increase in GDP of €206 billion—or 1.9% of GDP—by 2020. Put another way, this GDP increase will play out across the region in the following way: in the Northern European countries (2.2%), followed by New Member States (1.9%), and Southern European countries (1.6%).
  2. Furthermore, opening up and ensuring easy access to data for the public provides benefits both for data holders and data users. It will provide maximum ease of access to data enables business and technological innovation, and enhance excellence in public services through increased transparency of governmental services. Finally, better informed citizens are able to make more efficient use of public sector services. From a private sector standpoint, it will offer private companies an opportunity to build trust with customers by giving them greater say in how their personal data is used and will increase validity of research by allowing for more sophisticated analysis of large data sets.
  3. It is also crucial to recognize the different levels of preparedness of individual Member States for the challenges and opportunities of a data-driven economy will allow for policy solutions that are both tailored to local specificities and strengthen the scale of the common market. Create a truly single digital market will help lower the entry barriers to the big data industry in Europe, facilitating pan-EU ICT solutions with lower costs for consumers and the public sector.
  4. Finally, tackling the innovation lag, to ensure appropriate open data policies and securing finance for innovative data solutions will allow Europe to foster the talent it needs to ensure its competitive edge, especially through SMEs generating most of the economic growth – or downturn – in the region.

 

Mar02

Open Government and Technologies to Achieve Openess

Posted by in opengovernment

Open Government

Open Government refers to a wave of transformation within Government organizations across the globe aimed at better connection with citizens and communities. Open Government refers to the new, innovative ways how Government opens itself to the organizations and citizens, how it is directly engaged with the citizens in bringing and expanding new innovative services, how it opens up the internal resources and share those resources with whoever wants to use them, how it uses broad collaboration and participation to increase the power of effectiveness and efficiency of its processes and how it opens internal processes and policies achieving true transparency for the masses.

Note: What is Open Government? In the most basic sense, it’s the notion that the people have the right to access the documents and proceeding of government. (Lathrop & Ruma)

The common principles of Open Government initiatives are:

  • Transparency – to enable greater accountability, efficiency, and economic opportunity by making government data and operations more open.
  • Participation – to create early and effective opportunities to drive greater and more diverse expertise into government decision making.
  • Collaboration – to generate new ideas for solving problems by fostering cooperation across government departments, across levels of government, and with the public.

Today, Government around the world want to be stronger contributor to the overall social ecosystem and it wants to connect more individuals, communities and businesses. Interestingly, today Government don’t want to do that adding additional layer of bureaucracy and processes, instead they are looking at the outside world and opening internal processes asking for help in defining innovation and change. (Lathrop & Ruma).

Technologies for Open Government

The first wave of “digital” Government that was introduced a decade ago delivered some important milestones and benefits to society. Unfortunately, they were very limited in change that they brought to the life: they mainly focused on automating existing processes in the Government or introducing to already existing Government services additional digital layer – no major process changes or new channels of distribution were introduced in those years.

‘Government 2.0’ (also referred to as e-Government) typically refers to the use of Internet, Digital Media, and Web technologies to enable Open Government initiatives and improve connections with organizations and citizens. Government itself exist to enable the citizens access to different elements of the digital heritage like books or national archives but also to enable access to any type of data that is stored somewhere, regardless of the format how the data is stored. New technologies today are very effective in sharing and enabling the data: social networks, web sites and even games are opening up the services enabled by Open Government.

But Government 2.0 is not only about opening up to organizations and citizens outside, it is also about empowering officials inside the Government to look for a changes need and to go over traditional boundaries and limits. It is also about empowerment to work inside and outside, from bottom to top, through any limits that they had inside their organization to bring the value to the true stakeholders – citizens.

Two main technological developments changed the way how Government manages information and content.

These are:

  1. widespread adoption of technologies that enables storing of the digital data in ad-hoc manner – they are digitally stored the moment they are created
  2. use of broadband technologies through the countries that enables the organization and citizens to find and use Government data in effective and rapid way

Creating data in digital form is one of the most important factors when you consider the use of Government data. Since data is in digital form right from the beginning, it is very easy to store, move, copy, share or manage the data. At the same time, digital data brings additional problems, like security, authorization, access, management and interoperability.

Existence of broadband technologies (Internet as an example) enable that data created in digital form travels fast and shares even faster. Using the advanced technologies also open a different level of collaboration, participation, social inclusion and existence between Government and organizations and citizens.

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